Dell Emulex Family of Adapters - Manual (Page 745)

OneCommand NIC Teaming and VLAN Manager User Manual P009415-01A Rev. A
1. Overview
745
1. Overview
The Emulex
®
OneCommand
™
Network Interface Card (NIC) Teaming and Virtual
Local Area Network (VLAN) Manager allows you to group multiple NICs as a single
virtual device and provides the ability to team two or more NIC/vNIC ports. It also
enables you to add one or more VLANs over a team or over a NIC/vNIC.
A VLAN is a network of computers that behave as if they are connected to the same
wire even though they may actually be physically located on different segments of a
Local Area Network (LAN). VLANs are configured through software rather than
hardware, which make them extremely flexible. One advantage of a VLAN is that when
a computer is physically moved to another location, it can stay on the same VLAN
without any hardware reconfiguration.
To increase throughput and bandwidth, and to increase link availability, you can
configure multiple network interfaces on one or more ethernet ports to appear to the
network as a single interface. This is referred to as Network Interface Card (NIC)
teaming, or multi-link trunking.
NIC teaming has several advantages.

Increased bandwidth – Two or more network interfaces are combined to share
the load, thus increasing bandwidth.

Load balancing – Link aggregation enables distribution of processing and
communication across multiple links.

Higher link availability – Prevents a single link failure from disturbing traffic
flow.
The Windows NIC Teaming and VLAN Manager supports:

vNIC teaming

Reactivation delay – Ensures that the primary team adapter is ready to carry
traffic before a failback occurs. For more information, see “Changing the
General Settings” on page 769.

The auto-refresh setting specifies how often the OneCommand NIC Teaming
and VLAN Manager refreshes itself. For more information, see “Changing the
General Settings” on page 769.

Switch independent teaming types

Failover (FO) – If configured for fault tolerance, the system provides only
failover. For more information, see “Failover (FO)” on page 747.

Auto Failback

Smart load balancing (SLB) – If configured for load balancing, failover is
included. For more information, see “Smart Load Balancing” on page 747.

TX/RX load balancing

TCP/IP load balancing

Non-TCP/IP TX load balancing

Media Access Control (MAC) address load balancing

Switch dependent teaming types